David Poehlman wrote:
I'm missing something. If I go from one page to another on a site, that
seems to me to be history. What am I missing? If I go back, I should be
able to retrace my steps.
Yep and that's all handled natively by typical browsers. Unless the back
button won't work for some reason, the publisher gets this functionality
for free.
If I come in from somewhere else, there should be
no breadcrum brail unless I'm missing something.
A good breadcrumbs implementation has nothing to do with your browsing
history, despite the name "breadcrumbs". I think it would be rather
confusing to try and express surfing history as a chain of greater than
relationships.
When you come in from another site or a distant cousin of the page
elsewhere in the site hierarchy, you do not know the levels between the
page you're now on and the site's homepage. Breadcrumbs immediately
explain that genealogy and make each ancestor page immediately accessible.
For example, I arrive by search engine at the product page for a
Hotpoint ZX500 washing machine at a white goods retailer's website. I
might get a breadcrumb like this:
AppliancesAreUs > Catalog > Washing machines > Hotpoint ZX500
Perhaps Hotpoint ZX500 turns out to be not quite the washing machine for
me. Now I can jump straight to see other products in the category I'm
interested in with the washing machines link. I don't need to go to
another page, trawl through the site map, and hunt around for the
relevant category. And thank goodness for that, as it would make
comparing washing machines much slower and I'd be tempted to go to
another site.
If I want to know a sites structure, I shold be able to get it but
not be made to waide through it.
Nobody's "made to wade through it", since tools should make it easy to
skip it and frequently do make it so.
A breadcrumb list is the genealogy of an individual webpage, not a site
map of the entire website tree. A better name for the breadcrumbs design
pattern would probably be "page ancestors" or "page genealogy".
--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
